Many things are re-used in the gaming industry; physics engines are licensed as it is often cheaper to rent one than to make your own, characters and worlds are remade into sequels and cross-overs, and one of the most common and the worst is when story elements are rehashed. Not only does video gaming do this, but the entire media industry seems to be in the habit of repacking old ideas with new shiny explosions and CGI characters. If this were a blog on movies, you would hear me rant on Avatar being Pocahontas: 3000.
This, however, is a blog on video games. So today you will hear a rant on how RPGs, or role-playing games, reuse several of the same story elements. Over. And over. And over again.
I am certain that most of this information is cataloged elsewhere; this is simply a tirade of my own feelings on the subject and for people to discuss. I just ask for no one to link me to TvTropes. I don’t feel like losing twelve hours of my life right now.
It’s a Good Start
Perhaps the worst position for any RPG character to be in is to be the parent’s of the main character. Either one of them is never mentioned at all or they were horribly maimed. There are no other options for such characters. A missing parent may come back as a villain, but they were either mauled as a lead up to their disappearance, or they likely end up destroyed at the hands of the main character himself, or both in some circumstances. Fathers have it especially bad, as they are usually the ones that turn up as villains, are never mentioned at all, or were brutally murdered before or at the start of the game to fuel the character’s vengeance.
The best characters, in theory, are those that have both personal and worldly reasons behind their quest. Many RPGs try to exploit this by thinking that family death or destruction is a great personal reason that works in any situation to give the hero a good familiar reason to go do their quest. Yet, it gets old. To the point that some characters lacking the personal reasoning have been better than those who are avenging their father who turns out to be the very thing they hate. There can also be other personal motives behind a character than a stolen girlfriend or a murdered childhood. It is just sad when you start a brand new RPG and expect the main character’s father to be dead or long gone or not even touched upon and you’ll almost always be right.
Perhaps due to their lack of parents or a mother sobbing over a father’s death and thus forgetting her responsibilities as a parent, it is a common theme that RPG heroes wake up late on their Big Day, which happens to be the start of the game. Either he had some important Test of Skill or the Generic Town-wide Celebration was today, and the main character just missed the start. Yet, this plays into the plot by making him just miss the bandits that ransacked the town while he slept or the important sage character is out of neat weapons to give him. No one seems to complain, though, if he shows up at the laboratory late or make a big deal of how he slept through the screams of burning peasants, so it all seems to be the natural and normal thing to do that you soon forget that he was late or wonder why they made it a point at all outside of riding on past victories of previous games.
Now, all of these previous situations are usually only important if the character is a younger person just on the brim of adulthood or still a teenager. Characters that begin at an older age have their very own start to an adventure. Amnesia! It’s the time-old excuse for having an aged character need to start at level one as well as go through tutorial levels. The concept also commonly pops up in other places in games, and it albeit is rarer than the previous starts discussed just due to the rarity of a RPG hero to not be a teenager, but it always seems to be used in the situations where inexperience isn’t an excuse. People cannot start new jobs at age thirty five obviously; you have to start training in a career at ten years old and keep it for your entire life without ever branching out or learning anything new. You can only learn the same things over again by conveniently getting amnesia as you are about to embark in a quest.
The Company You Keep… And They Keep… And They Also Keep…
Most RPGs have a party of characters that join and accompany the main hero on his quest through the world. Sadly, not all of these characters are as vibrant and three-dimensional as the main character or not even close to him.
Many games will have one neat character though, one who has a completely unique fighting style and is definitely not a human or anything close. They could attack with slot machines, frying pans, or even kitchen utensils while their bodies are all colors of the rainbow and all shapes and sizes. Sadly, these characters don’t get much work beyond making them different. These strange fighting tactics are usually terrible compared to normal characters, even when the gambles ‘pay off.’ They rarely appear outside of the scenes where you originally get them in your party and only occupy spaces in the back during important story moments. Rarer yet is for them to even get a ‘moment’ of their own, where they have an epiphany or something happens with them to tug the player’s heartstrings a bit.
Sadder yet, it seems the developers spend all the time they have on making party members unique on that one guy. For the rest of your party members, you have a mage, a knight, a healer, a thief, and usually a double or combination character. The knight is almost always a super good guy who follows the law and hates the thief’s guts. The healer is a girl and usually is the damsel in distress many times as well as the main character’s primary love interest. Usually the thief is a shifty type who originally planned to use your party for their own devices but tends to turn around at some point in the adventure. The thief is also often the main character’s rival from old times that begrudgingly joins him due to circumstances at the time.
The Final Act… For the Fourteenth Time
Despite the obvious jab at the name of the series, this section isn’t about Final Fantasy directly. This is about the end of the game, the final curtain, another section of role-playing games that are simply rife with clichés that pop up in many games in the genre. Such as plot twists that are no longer surprising in the least as they happen every single time.
The definite one that happens in pretty much every single role-playing game is the final boss of the title. Either the main villain you fought tooth-and-nail grows some dark angelic wings or an extra-dimensional demon that was really pulling the strings pops out of nowhere, but the end result is that the final boss is not the villain you were fighting all along and they are typically a big and bad monstrosity or the epitome of unholy. Seriously, I can’t even think of a single example where this is not the case.
Why is this done? Well, obviously to give you a big and scary monster to face off against where you know the fate of the world is decided by the fight’s outcome. Why is this bad? Obviously because every role-playing game out there does it and there is no stopping it. You expect to not face the same villain you’ve learned to detest through your trials at their hands as the final boss. You know the developers are going to throw you a ‘twist’ and make you fight something else or make that villain grow devilish features and several feet of height by the end. Some role-playing games don’t even fully explain the final boss. You face off against the villain, defeat them, then all of a sudden – BAM – here’s a monstrous demon for you to fight whose name you won’t remember after you defeat him unlike the other villain who was actually a pushover.
Why can’t a game keep the major villain to the end? Honestly, I don’t know. I think somewhere there’s a developer who tries this before a producer comes in and shouts, “No! We need bigger! More evil!” I’m sure some developers are also deluded into thinking that it is still surprising that there’s another boss after you finish with the main villain. Perhaps the villains they created weren’t good enough. There has to be a reason out there, but I honestly don’t think it needs to be kept true.
Then, when everything is said and done, you’re not done with the clichés. Quite usually, during the final cut scenes, one of your party members will die. Sorry, I spoiled that for you, but there is almost always a valiant sacrifice on the behalf of your party or even your main character. That, or one of your characters was really an other-wordly being who fades back into their own dimension now that their work is complete. All-in-all, your party will not survive past the final boss fight intact. There will either be a heroic sacrifice, someone departing to other planes, or just everyone splitting up and never speaking again with each other despite fighting for their lives together.
Many RPGs do try new things, and sadly they don’t often get credit for it. Hell, I probably did not give enough credit to many RPGs with this, both the ones that try to avoid the old failsafes and the ones that are chock full of clichés yet are still good otherwise. Many games that are not the popular titles that began these clichés slip right under the radar and their originality is never awarded. I am also sure that producers (bane of most designer’s dreams and creativity) have a lot of say in this re-use of plot elements, perhaps as much as the unoriginality in the developer’s court.
While humanity has a lot to learn from history, and the saying goes that we should not repeat the past’s mistakes, there gets to be a point where too much repetition of the past’s success gets to be a mistake.
